Category: aesthetics

A Brand of Writing

A couple of months ago I attended a two-day Masterclass in Food Writing at the British Library (for me, always an awe-inspiring institution). Designed and taught by the food writer Mallika Basu, the class...

Absence of Mind: Book Review

Marilynne Robinson, Absence of Mind, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010. If you’re reading Robinson’s essays, you probably have already read her novels. You may well approach the essays as I did,...

Marcella! A Review of Amarcord

This one is a memoir, rather than a cookbook.  It’s full of detailed information: places, times,  details about food and preparation and teaching and publishing — and marriage.  There’s a particularly memorable contrast between...

Field Green: Book Review

It must be a memoir.  A reader —  or a fact-checker — could challenge any number of things, especially names, including the name of the author.  But there can be no doubt about the...

Needing a Translator

We’d been skyping for months, both really enjoying it, I think — my husband kept noticing how much laughter was coming from the room where the really big computer lives. I was translating Lambert’s...

The Gospel of Goodlands

Maybe we’re all searching for good news these days, whether consciously or not, but I thought this was so good on so many levels that I wanted to, well, just vote “yes,” I guess,...